POVERTY ALLEVIATION PROGRAMMES OF INDIA

The government
of India and state governments since independence have designed and implemented
various poverty alleviation programmes across the country. Some of them have
been successful and has helped to lift a lot of people from the poverty line.
Though the task is not yet complete, a lot needs to be done so that India
becomes a poverty free country in the years to come.

Recent Poverty Updates:

Poverty in India de­clined to a
record 22% in 2011- 12 according to planning commission. As a result of
various government programmes, pov­erty in India declined to a record 22%
in 2011-12, according to the Planning Commission.

Over the last decade, poverty has
witnessed a consis­tent decline with the levels dropping from 37.2% in
2004-05 to 29.8% in 2009-10.

The number of poor is now
estima-ted at 269.3 million, of which 216.5 million reside in rural India.

Govt's poverty alleviation programmes

Alleviation of
poverty remains a major challenge before the Government. Acceleration of
economic growth, with a focus on sectors which are employment-intensive,
facilitates the removal of poverty in the long run. However, this strategy
needs to be complemented with a focus laid on provision of basic services for
improving the quality of life of the people and direct state intervention in
the form of targeted anti-poverty progra­mmes. While growth will continue to be
the prime mover, anti-poverty programmes supplement the growth effort and
protect the poor from destitution, sharp fluctuations in employment and incomes
and social insecurity

The specifically
designed anti­poverty programmes for generation of both self-employment and
wage-employment in rural areas have been redesigned and restructured in order
to enhance their efficacy/ impact on the poor and improve their sustainability.

Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee
Act (MGNREGA)

The Mahat-ma
Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) is a law that aims to
guarantee the 'right to work' and ensure livelihood security in rural areas by
providing at least 100 days of guaranteed wage employment in a financial year
to every household whose adult members volunteer to do unskilled manual work.
The statute is hailed by the government as "the largest and most ambitious
social security and public works programme in the world".

Unlike its
precursors, the MG NREGA guaranteed employment as a legal right. However, the
problem areas are still the same as they were in the 1960s. The most
significant ones are lack of public awareness, mismanagement and above all mass
corruption.

It took 30 years
of govern­ment experimentation to launch major schemes like Jawahar Rozgar
Yojana (JRY), Employ­ment Assurance Scheme (EAS), Food for Work Programme
(FVVP), Jawahar Gram Samridhi Yojana (JGSY) and Sampoorna Grameen Rozgar Yojana
(SGRY) that were forerunners to Mahatma Gandhi NREGA. In the process, the
government decentralized implementation by providing financial and functional
autonomy to the local self-government institutions or Panchayati Raj
Institutions (PR1s) in order to fight corruption.

Food Security Act

The government
rolled out its most ambitious social welfare scheme - Food Security Act in
2013. It aims to provide cheap food grain to 67% of the population. The Act is
the biggest of its kind in the world and is estimated to spend about more than
1.5% of the GDP that might amount to Rs 1,25,000 crore annually for the
government. The Act will provide uniform allocation of 5 kg foodgrain (per
person) at fixed rate of Rs 3 for rice, Rs 2 for wheat and Rs 1 for coarse
grains per kg to 75% of the rural population and 50% of the poor in urban
India, which put together would be around 800 million people.

Swarana jayanti Gram
Swarozgar Yojana (SGSY)

The single
self-employment programme of Swarnjayanti Gram Swarozgar Yojana (SGSY),
launched from 1999, has been conceived keeping in view the strengths and
weaknesses of the earlier schemes of Integrated Rural Development Programme
(IRDP) and Allied Programmes along with Million Wells Scheme (MWS). The
objective of restructuring was to make the programme more effective in
providing sustainable incomes through micro enterprises. The SGSY lays emphasis
on focussed approach to poverty alleviation, capitalising advantages of group
lending, overcoming the problems associated with multiplicity of programmes.
SGSY is conceived as a holistic programme of micro enterprises covering all
aspects of self employment viz. organisation of the rural poor into self help
groups (SHGs) and their capacity building, planning of activity clusters,
infrastructure build up, technology credit and marketing.

Under the SGSY,
the focus is on vulnerable sections among the rural poor with SCs/STs
accounting for 50%, women 40% and the disabled 3% of the beneficiaries.

Jawahar Gram Samridhi Yojana (YGSY)

The Jawahar
Rozgar Yojana (JRY) has been recast as the Jawahar Gram Samridhi Yojana (JGSY)
to impart a thrust to creation of rural infrastructure. While the JRY resulted
in creation of wage employment. It was felt that a stage had come when rural
infrastructure needed to be taken up in a planned manner and given priority.
The Gram Panchayats can effectively determine their infrastructure needs and
the responsibility of implementing the programme has been entrusted to the Gram
Panchayats. The funds are directly released to the Gram Panchayats by the
DRDAs/Zilla Parishads. The JGSY is implemented with funding in the ratio of
75:25 between the Centre and the States. The primary objective of JGSY is
creation of demand driven community village infrastructure including durable
assets at the village level and assets to enable the rural poor to increase the
opportunities for sustained employment. The secondary objective is generation
of supplementary employment for the unemployed poor in the rural areas. The
wage employment under the programme is given to Below Poverty Lines (BPL)
families. While there is no sectoral earmarking of resources under JGSY, 22.5%
of the annual allocation must be ''spent on individual beneficiary schemes for
SCs/STs and 3% is to be utilised for creation of barrier free infrastructure
for the disabled.

National Social Assistance Programme (NSAP)

The NSAP was
launched as a 100% Centrally Sponsored Scheme with the aim to provide social
assistance benefit to poor households in the case of old age, death of primary
breadwinner and maternity. The programme supplements the efforts of the state
governments with the objective of ensuring minimum national levels of well
being and the Central assistance is an addition to the benefit that the States
are already providing on Social Protection Schemes or may provide in future.
The provision of Central assistance seeks to ensure that social protection to
beneficiaries is uniformly available. The main features of the three components
of the NSAP namely; (i) National Old Age Pension Scheme (NOAPS), (ii) National
Family Benefit Scheme (NFBS) and (iii) National Maternity Benefit Scheme
(NMBS).

In National Old
Age Pension Scheme (NOAPS) old age pension of Rs 75 per month, per beneficiary
is provided to person of 65 years and above who is a destitute in the sense of
having little or no regular means of subsistence from his/ her own sources of
income or through support from family members or other sources.

National Maternity Benefit Scheme (NMBS)

A lump sum cash
assistance of Rs 500 is provided to pregnant women of households below the
poverty line up to the first two live births provided they are of 19 years of
age and above. The maternity benefit is to be disbursed in one installment, 12-
8 weeks prior to the delivery. In case of delay it can be disbursed to the
beneficiary even after the birth of the child. The NSAP is implemented by the
state/Union territories (UT) with assistance from panchayats and municipal
functionaries. Each State/UT has a nodal department identified for implementing
the scheme. In the districts, there are District Level Committees on NSAP.

The gram
panchayats have an active role in the identifi­cation of beneficiaries under
NSAP. The state governments communicate targets for the three components of
NSAP to panchayats so that identification of beneficiaries can suitably be made
by gram panchayat committees in line with these targets. In case of cash
disburse­ment, the payments are to be made in public meetings prefe­rably of
Gram Sabha meetings in villages, and of neighbourhood committees in urban
areas. The panchayats are responsible for disseminating information about NSAP
and the procedures for obtaining benefits under it. In this task, the
panchayats and municipali­ties are encouraged to seek the cooperation of
voluntary agencies to the extent possible for identifying beneficiaries and
persuading them to avail of the benefits intended for them.

Annapurna Scheme

In 2000, the
government launched Annapurna to provide food security to those senior citizens
who are not covered under the Targeted Public Distribution System (TPDS) and
who have no income of their own and none to take care of them, in the village.
It provides 10 kg of food grains per month free of cost to all such persons who
are eligible for old age pensions but are presently not receiving it and whose
children are not residing in the same village; The Gram Panchayats would be
required to identify, prepare and display a list of such persons.

India has come a
long way in giving benefits to the needy. And in order give livelihood
opportunities, the government has framed a number of policies which are
benefiting the poor people, but alot is yet to be achieved.